What a time it had been! How I had rushed off on the following morning to emancipate myself from the thraldom of Jobson’s! With what glee I had run up to London, on the Captain’s advice, to buy an outfit for the voyage, and how I had swaggered down the Minories with the rolling gait of a seasoned buccaneer, followed by a porter staggering under the burden of a colossal seaman’s chest. How the said chest had been triumphantly flung open in the _Lady Jane’s_ cabin and made to disgorge piles of storm suits, sail needles, palms, jumpers, dungarees, marlin-spikes, boat compasses, sheath knives, pistols, until the Captain fell back on the locker and fairly shouted with laughter. All these things surged through my mind until the voice of the branch pilot wishing the Captain a pleasant voyage as he stepped down into his boat, recalled me to the fact that our voyage was really begun and that the wide ocean lay before us. On the incidents of the voyage it is not my intention to dwell. It was on the whole an eminently prosperous voyage, and for that very reason singularly devoid of incident, although to me, fresh from the grinding routine of an office, every minute of the day brought with it something new, surprising and delightful. For hours at a time would I pace the heaving deck listening to the song of the breeze as it hummed through the rigging or murmured in the hollows of the sails; gazing with unwearied eyes at the ever new prospect of sunny sky and incredibly blue sea that stretched away on all sides like a moving mass of liquid sapphire. The dainty pink “Portuguese men of war” that drifted past in endless processions, and the fantastic forms of the flying fish, were wonders that never staled; the porpoises that gambolled around our bows seemed like the creatures from some Eastern fable, while at night, the glitter of the moonbeams on the water and the sparkle of the Noctiluca in the vessel’s shadow furnished visions of beauty beyond my wildest dreams. Yet, novel and delightful as it was to me, the voyage was, as I have said, quite uneventful. The north-easterly breeze with which we started carried us to the chops of the Channel, and then veering round to the south-west gave us a fortnight of what the Captain grumblingly described as “wind-jamming.” At length, as we approached the thirtieth parallel, we felt the first breath of the north-east trade wind, and thereafter a fresh draught poured constantly over our quarter until we were well south of the latitude of Cape Verde. In all this time the only land we sighted was the peak of Teneriffe, which one day lay on the extreme verge of the horizon and which I at first took to be a bank of cloud. One morning when we were between five and six weeks out, on coming out of my berth I found the Captain seated at the table thoughtfully contemplating a perspiring slab of corned pork which lay before him, while he slowly stirred his coffee.